Don Quixote, the Crusades and slowly reading still

Nearly a year ago, I began a journey through The Well-Educated Mind. The first novel in the reading list is Don Quixote.

It's been a year.

I'm still trying to read Don Quixote.

It is SO long. Well, really, it's just a little over a thousand pages in paperback. It shouldn't take me this long. But, I suppose what I'm learning is that it isn't a speed read kind of book. The language is above my reading level. I have to read slowly to grasp the meanings and the many nuances of his language.

I've realized that Cervantes will need more than one blog post to make a book review. The plot starts out rather silly, with our poor addle-minded lead thinking he is a character from one of his treasured tales of knights errant. He goes off on adventures that are simply ridiculous.

But, the author often surprises me with his wit, as I discussed in this earlier post.

This morning, as I venture to read more of Don Quixote's silly antics, I am nearing the halfway point of this novel. For the first time, I find myself actually interested in the tale he tells as he describes his experiences as a soldier in the Crusades.

Of his fellow soldiers who fell in battle, he writes:

'O happy souls, delivered and set free

By heroes in a sacrosanct campaign

from the dark prison of mortality

to soar aloft to heaven's supreme domain:

Your breasts with noble zeal and fury glowed,

you tireless sinews braved prodigious toil

your blood with that of Turks and Arabs flowed

to stain the sea and drench the dusty soil.

Your earthly lives but not your courage failed

in bodies from which all the strength had flown, 

victorious though defeated and bewailed

on perishing between cold steel and stone;

because for such a death before such foes

its fame the world, its glory heaven bestows.'

It makes me think that Cervantes could have been a hymn writer.